Carribean fails at tackling poverty

By Wesley Gibbings, IPS, 22 June 2000

PORT OF SPAIN, Jun 22 (IPS) - Three years into the first International
Decade for the Eradication of Poverty, countries of the Commonwealth
Caribbean are reporting mixed results while all are experiencing
problems reaching social policy targets.

A recent study conducted by the Jamaica Survey of Living Conditions
(JSLC) indicates, for example, that the incidence of poverty in
the cash- strapped north Caribbean island has actually been on the
decline. But while the JSLC was pointing to the lowest poverty
figures in over a decade - a 15.9 percent incidence level - access
to some basic services remained starkly absent.

The JSLC study found that up to 72 percent of poor households used
pit latrines and only 12 percent had indoor plumbing.

A similar Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) sponsored survey in
Belize in 1998 found that "deep-seated structural problems of
transformation have kept the population of parts of the country
locked in poverty for some considerable period."

The survey concluded that in this lone Central American member of
the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) 25.3 percent of all households
and 33 percent of individuals were poor on the basis of their
expenditure on food and non-food items.

"Moreover," the study said, "9.6 percent of households and 13.4
percent of individuals were considered to be extremely poor or
indigent: their level of expenditure was not high enough to enable
them to satisfy their basic food requirements."

The problem has moved CDB President Neville Nicholls to declare
that "there is a patent need to temper economic reform strategies
with policies designed to promote social equity."

Such a prescription has featured highly in the deliberations of
the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the
Caribbean (ECLAC) which had convened the first-ever Caribbean
Ministerial meeting on poverty in 1996.

"Income distribution hasn't changed in the past decade," a recent
ECLAC study revealed. "High levels of inequality persist and several
countries have the most concentrated income distribution in the
world."

"This has happened even in countries that have achieved significant
growth rates," the study said.

ECLAC said that "reciprocal conditioning between growth and equity
and the distributive content of development depends critically on
the application of policies that promote wider social distribution
of the benefits of economic growth."

Consequently, the smaller economies of the region continue to face
more than their fair share of challenges.

In St. Lucia, for example, the decline in earnings from the banana
industry and negative growth in the light manufacturing sector over
recent years have been blamed for high levels of poverty accounting
for 18.7 percent of households and 25.1 percent of individuals.

In that island, a much-touted Poverty Reduction Fund set up in 1998
and which gained widespread community support faced questions of
corruption and led to successive audits by the government. In the
end, no evidence of corruption was found though there were indications
of "several administrative lapses and infelicities".

In Trinidad and Tobago, which has been benefiting from an expanding
economy and falling unemployment, vigilance remains the word in
the monitoring of poverty, and new mechanisms are being examined
to alleviate the plight of an arguably growing under-class.

In 1998, for instance, a Hardship Relief Fund was established to,
among other things, offset up to 25 percent of the water bills of
poor households and, last year, a school-based Book Loan Scheme
was introduced targeting 53,000 students.

"Effective poverty reduction must incorporate policies and programmes
that are geared to alleviating the plight of the poor, the socially
displaced, the street children, the homeless and the elderly,"
Finance Minister Brian Kuei Tung said in his budget presentation
last October.

Many, however, dispute a claim by the government that measures,
such as an increase in government pensions to a minimum of 100
dollars a month, had effectively lifted such persons out of the
poverty cycle.

There is general recognition, though, that further action in this
area is needed. In Kuei Tung's words: "The benefits from development
are not always equitably or fairly distributed."

In a poverty assessment survey conducted in St. Vincent and the
Grenadines, researchers made a similar point with reference to the
allocation and availability of national resources.

"The Government needs to reorganise its tax regime in such a way
that it can continue to maintain balance, having regard to the
requirements to expand the economic and social infrastructure and
to provide a safety-net for the vulnerable," the survey said.

Measures such as these are specifically defined in the Declaration
and Programme of Action of the 1995 World Summit for Social
Development. But, in many cases, Caribbean governments have been
hard-pressed to comply in the face of sharp declines in their
economic fortunes.

Against that backdrop, a role for the developed world is increasingly
being defined, even in the face of a reversal of past trends.

Addressing the recent General Assembly of the Organisation of
American States, St. Lucia's Foreign Minister, George Odlum noted
that "the track record ... is rather in the direction of reducing
assistance to developing countries and not increasing such assistance."

"As the new millennium beckons, a looming prospect of the digital
divide threatens to make the insecure people of the developing
world even more insecure and, consequently, even more desperate.
Desperation breeds conflict," the minister warned.

So far, countries of the Caribbean have staved off such a response
to growing insecurities but recent conflict in Guyana, St. Vincent
and the Grenadines and persistent political conflict in Jamaica
are thought, by some, to be the seeds of a far more volatile future.

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